Edwin Barnard - Capturing Time - Panoramas of Old Australia (2012)

The panorama was the IMAX of its age. When the world’s first panorama building opened in London’s Leicester Square in 1793 the crowds that attended were amazed at how real the painted scenes appeared. If an actual trip to Cairo, Constantinople or Van Diemen’s Land was out of the question, for a shilling you could experience the next best thing at home. This book explores that ability panoramas possess to transport us to another place and time. Centred around a collection of fascinating panoramas made between the 1820’s and the 1930’s, it takes you on a journey back through the years to walk the streets of Sydney when it was the convicts’ capital, to gold rush Melbourne and to lonely Perth struggling to establish a toehold on the continent’s remote western frontier. All of the nation’s capitals are included in a collection that offers a unique view of Australia’s past.